painking

A hohmann transfer is a big science word for a transfer between 2 planets on the same plane. http://ksp.olex.biz/ http://alexmoon.github.io/ksp/ You can use that to help you with transfers to anywhere. The first link simply provides the phase angles and ejection angles needed for the transfer, the second link is more detailed. Note that the phase angle and ejection angles aren't listed in game, so you'll have to eyeball it if you don't have any of the many flight info read out mods.

It doesn't seem like Duna was in phase when you did your ejection burn. If it was then those wittle baby xenon engines took too long with the thrust. The way you wanna do it is to wait for the planet to reach the proper phase angle, so your ejection burn will just sling you right out there and you'll run into the planet's SoI along the way.You -could- do it the rendesvous way but that's a looot of work and dV to waste. I feel, it would be better to use a nuclear engine to do all the big boy burns and have the xenon engines do smaller burns to fix your orbit how you want it to be.

The most base mods you could get is KW rocketry for rocket parts, B9 Aerospace for (mostly) plane parts, Kerbal Engineer for flight info, and Mechjeb for the same+autopilot functionality. There's a whole heaping ton of mods, you should really go on a case-by-case basis, i.e, which mod fulfills your current parts/plugin needs.

I hope we can keep this thread going. I'm wanting to start my own Kethane base but I've a creative mental block at the moment, would totally love some pictures to get the gears spinning.

1: Make sure you're docking the same size of docking port. 2: Make sure what you're actually trying to dock to is a port, this happens more often than I'd care to admit. 3: Pictures, to help better alleviate the problem.

It's the mind-warping power of maths at work, it's usually safe to err on the side of "it's an encounter". If not usually a small burn of a few m/s in the appropriate direction should get encounter.

I suppose one could use the linear ports for docking, or, maybe just helping to turn very large ships without expending lots of RCS.

I think it's as easy as opening the .cfg and editing them to be empty, not to mention I'm fairly certain someone already beat it to you. You can get empty stock and KW rocketry fuel tanks on the spaceport.

It's only alpha, there really isn't much to do besides mess around. Career mode is a long long way from full implementation.

draw a picture of the appropriate flag size, save it as a .PNG, plop it into the appropriate folder and you're good to go.

Interesting stuff to know. Ok, thanks for the advice.

The only reason I propose this is so that I can get smaller craft into deep space. I could build a big monster rocket with lots of fuel and go wherever I want, but I like my little-r rocket that looks nice and compact. Would I have to worry about a planet moving out of phase as I wait for the right phase angle since my orbit would be so large?

Is this a good idea? The majority of an ejection burn for interplanetary transfer is just breaking out of Kerbin's SoI, so I could just get an orbit rendesvous with it from low orbit, refuel, and then head off into the solar system. I think it'd be good for Jool since it takes a lot of dV to move around it, and it sounds like a simpler alternative than building larger rockets.

To clarify more on #1, I ask because I had assumed that it meant ejection burn. I had used it to plan a trip to Duna (optimal settings), but within 1 minute to go till launch, I noticed that I was facing Kerbin retrograde, rather than the 159 degrees prograde I was supposed to be, so obviously I wouldn't reach Duna at all unless i was supposed to make a mid course burn. I was in fact at the height I specified in the launch planner, so I'm not sure what went wrong.

1: Regarding Alexmoon's interplanetary launch planner, is the date of departure the time to leave the launch pad, or the time to begin the ejection burn? 2: Are fairings worth it? They just seem to ruin the aerodynamics of my rockets. 3: The one bit I trouble with in terms of landing is usually those final few meters. I can't throttle my ship low enough to lightly touchdown, so I usually bump into the surface at about 5-10 m/s and bounce a bit but with any luck I'll still safely land. What can I do to fix this? 4: How does one actually get started with a base? With .21 eventually happening I shouldn't start now, but if I were, how would one start?

Well it certainly is a satellite. If you like the orbit and want it to scan Kethane like that forever than there's really nothing more to say. Could definitely look visibly better if that's something you care for. It could even use a tiny baby xenon engine with some fuel if you want it to do small orbital changes. Of course, you'd probably need bigger batteries to have a larger electricity supply for them.

So yeah, your question has indeed been answered. Mechjeb knows when to burn and for how long, and while it's scary to watch your rocket plummet to its death while mechjeb does nothing, you gotta trust its math. Mechjeb also occasionally just decides not to work. Try turning the autopilot on and off to see if it changes anything. Also your lander isn't going to rip itself apart. If rocket tears itself apart from too much thrust, then you didn't put enough struts on it.

double post.

Eve's atmosphere is thicker than Kerbin's and its gravity stronger. Landing via deceleration burns sounds kinda dangerous, not to mention a waste of fuel when there's all that cushiony air for your parachhutes to catch and slow you down. Strap some radial parachutes onto the radial engines cause I'm not sure if that one will slow your ship down enough. Also anything that lands on Eve usually doesn't come back. Since Eve is just overall bigger than Kerbin, you need more TWR to lift equivalent weights back on Kerbin. So to get that rover off of Eve requires a bigger rocket than the one that took you onto the planet in the first place. Doesn't seem like those radials have enough fuel to get the job done anyway. Atmoshphere's a whole 20km higher than Kerbin's.

The way the map sat works is that in map view you'll have the option to turn on a Kethane grid, which will show you the planet/moon with a hexagon overlay. Aach time a mapsat passes over a hexagon, it'll tell you whether or not there's kethane there. Kethane veins are typically quite large so if you find some, you can just land your miner in the general vicinity and start pulling kethane out of the ground. The more kethane, the bigger the vein.

The .cfg. Thought I've never messed with them myself so I can't give advice on how to do so.

If a part doesn't use power, it doesn't use power, simple as that AFAIK. You'd have to change the part yourself to have it consume electricity on use.

Struts. Parts follow a parent->child method of stacking and attaching, so you can't connect 2 pieces together with another piece.

I've also experienced decreased framerates orbiting Eelo, but I figured that was because the game had to keep loading the higher res surface textures as I flew by, it was a fairly low orbit.

Yeah, I don't think stock has any kind of dedicated cargo bay piece. The closest would be simply docking it to your ship, the inline clamp-o-tron also kind of looks like a cargo bay, but since it's shielded inside the VAB, that means you can't put anything onto it until you launch it.